New York City Starbucks Bathroom Lockout Ends Unceremoniously

When you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go. But in New York City, where public restrooms are at a minimum, the only place to go is usually a Starbucks. Since not everyone cares about cleanliness, that results in a dirty job for baristas. Some of those employees staged a mini revolt last week, locking customers out of bathrooms and adding “Employees Only” signs.

“I have personally cleaned up almost every humanly fluid and plenty that didn’t seem human,” the New York Times cites one employee’s message on the StarbucksGossip site as saying.

Gross fluids or no, that stand against defiled and desecrated bathrooms is already over, after many media outlets expressed outrage at being kept out. After all, how are you supposed to camp out with your laptop all day using the free Wi-Fi if you can’t empty your bladder from time to time?

After only a few days of complaints, the NYT says Starbucks management visited a few stores with locked bathrooms and told them to reopen them to customers.